How I became an ex-bookseller

So, it’s been a month since I quit the bookshop and, as I’ve neglected this blog for a while, I thought an epitaph might be a fitting way to kick things back into action.

For almost six years, I’d honed my book-recommending skills. Every day was a combination of shelving, ‘curating’ and waiting for a suitable victim customer who didn’t yet know that they were about to leave with a little piece of magic.

In the past four weeks, that has been the thing I’ve missed the most. How many other jobs can give you the opportunity to talk to strangers all day about your passion? That, I suppose, depends on your passions, but the world of bookselling attracts a specific bunch – people who love books so much that matters of salary and financial stability pale into insignificance.

And there you have my one and only reason for leaving – I simply couldn’t afford to do a job that I loved. Some people might be surprised to learn that bookselling is among the lowest paid professions you’re likely to find. A career in retail is, by itself, not very lucrative but even on this scale, bookselling ranks fairly close to the bottom.

Strangely though, this is the very reason that you’ll always encounter true passion whenever you go into a bookshop. The people shelving the books, writing the review cards and, indeed, gushing about their favourite books are there, not for the money, but because they love what they do. Either that or they lack ambition but this, I assure you, is a small contingent.

Even if you take the money out of the equation, there are other drawbacks to being a bookseller. Everyone who works in a bookshop will be familiar with the occasional doom-bringer. Every couple of weeks, this strange person arrives eager to remind you about Kindles and Amazon and how insecure your future is. Personally, I’d like to think that bookshops can hold their own. There are enough people willing to spend their money in a real bookshop to prevent the doomsday scenario that keeps anxious booksellers awake at night. However, being naturally cautious, I wasn’t prepared to take my chances.

As I write, it’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in Nero’s waiting for my old stomping ground to open. I want to visit my ex-colleagues and say hello but I also want to visit the books and make sure they’ve been loved in my absence. It’s a ritual I perform every week and each time, I find myself unconsciously tidying, reorganising and filling gaps. I don’t expect to be paid. After all, nobody does this job for the money.